One large area of application for random element generators is in traffic mixers. They are needed therein in order to mix the traffic at random and thus to achieve a good statistical traffic mixing.
The invention proceeds from traffic mixers of this kind and for example, from the random element generator used in them.
One traffic mixer of this type is described in European Patent Application, Publication No. 0 609 570 A1, corresponding to copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/178,095 filed Jan. 6, 1994. This device scrambles the sequence of the time slots of a synchronous data stream that is arriving in an ATM switching network (ATM=Asynchronous Transfer Mode). To do this, it writes the data packets contained in the time slots cyclically into a buffer and then reads them from the buffer according to randomly generated permutations. The permutations in this case are created by a pseudo-random generator that is formed by a feedback shift register.